Blog: Lunch with Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General News
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For those who haven't seen it, this is an informative blog post: Lunch with Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi

I resisted quoting the whole post but this portion may be of particular interest to some:

  • The Arduino roadmap includes new boards with speciality functions, including GPS, ethernet, ZigBee wireless, and cellular wireless.
  • The next generation of Arduino core boards will include Atmel's AtMega line with 64 I/O pins and 256k of memory.
  • After that, the project will move to Atmel's 32-bit line of chips.
  • People are considering implementing a proper debugger on the current Arduino platform, which would be great
  • Arduino could be ported to the ARM chips pretty easily, although there are no plans to do so at the moment

I suspect Massimo would appreciate not getting a barrage of "when is it being released?" questions. :slight_smile:

The existence of a "roadmap" does for me raise the question of how the Arduino community and tinker.it interact. If tinker.it doesn't want to publicly discuss their plans (which is their prerogative, for whatever their reasons) are we going to be duplicating each other's work? Is this desirable or just a fact of Arduino life?

Very cool to read the post.

--Phil.

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Hello

We had a nice chat about the future of arduino both from my personal point of view ad the grassroot work that people are doing

  • The Arduino roadmap includes new boards with speciality functions, including GPS, ethernet, ZigBee wireless, and cellular wireless.
    See ladyada gps and xport/matchport shield, the libellium zigbee and gsm modules, many people doing ethernet now

  • The next generation of Arduino core boards will include Atmel's AtMega line with 64 I/O pins and 256k of memory.
    this is a pretty obvious evolution looking at what people are doing with porting arduino to new cores and we are working to integrate that into the official release of the IDE

  • After that, the project will move to Atmel's 32-bit line of chips.
    This is more about my personal point of view of what is a natural evolution which doesn't require too much architectural changes.

  • People are considering implementing a proper debugger on the current Arduino platform, which would be great
    I had a nice chat with a couple of people at FooCamp about improving the debugging side of arduino..personally I think we should use the popularity of arduino to push atmel to open the debugwire protocol that would allow the creation of a debugger inside arduino.

  • Arduino could be ported to the ARM chips pretty easily, although there are no plans to do so at the moment
    actually i think someone is working on it now.. (not me)

Phil, there are no roadmaps.. i was having a chat with an arduino supporter, from geek to geek but he's also a journalist :slight_smile:

Wired is investigating the world of open hardware which I think it's good recognition for the work we all have been doing, arduino team, contributors, supporters and all the users.

PS: Tinker.it is made of 2 people who are part of Arduino but it doesn't represent Arduino and works a lot on things that are not Arduino related, like design projects and light projects. So when I speak to somebody it's a bit difficult to have a clear differentiation between massimo the professor of interaction design, massimo the geek, massimo the co-founder of arduino, massimo the CTO of tinker.it , massimo the italian etc etc etc

massimo

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Thanks for the expansion on some of these items Massimo...

I had a nice chat with a couple of people at FooCamp about improving the debugging side of arduino..personally I think we should use the popularity of arduino to push atmel to open the debugwire protocol that would allow the creation of a debugger inside arduino.

That would be cool. Which raises an interesting question for me--have you had any contact with/from Atmel in relation to the success Arduino has had with introducing many new people to the Atmel microcontrollers? I have no idea if the numbers are significant in Atmel's eyes (it's probably still small compared to an automobile manufacturer ordering millions) but Arduino certainly seems to be having what appears to be a big impact in its target market.

massimo the italian

Wait, you're Italian? :smiley:

--Phil.

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I've once followed an Arduino workshop in Amsterdam with Massimo and have been actively using the board ever since. I'm growing along with the development of the Arduino board, and it's great to see the hardware become more powerful. I'm looking forward to the Arduino Ethernet, and everything that will follow. Thanks alot for keeping up these developments and making things accessible for a large crowd, it's a great thing to do. Mille Grazie!